I do love this work, and I learn new things every day from my residents and my patients. One of the comments a resident said to me a few years ago has especially stuck with me. She said, “being patient centered is being prochoice.” The more I thought about it since then, however, the more I think it is true.

I suggest that that these doctors’ statements point to a paradox of the abortion conflict in the United States; whether abortion provider or supporter, engagement with this issue introduces these clinicians to a diverse group of allies, with a shared sense of mission, that is rare elsewhere in medicine.

“Sting” operations carried out by anti-choice groups who want to eliminate women’s access to abortion and birth control have become an issue in the United Kingdom where misrepresentation of the issue of sex selection is being used in a new series of attacks on providers.

Medical Students for Choice were and are still literally putting their futures and lives on the line by taking on the medical establishment as well as the anti-abortion zealots to bring forward new generations of abortion providers.

Wisconsin SB 306 will greatly impede the continuity of care and put up obstacles between a woman and her primary care physician. It is an unacceptable intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship because, among other things, it requires abortion providers to give patients inaccurate post-procedure instructions.

Few of us would sign up for a job that would pose risks to our personal safety and our family’s safety. Yet that is exactly what many—if not most—health-care providers sign up for when they decide to deliver abortion care in the United States.